Float tubes are a great way to expand your fishing options and get away from the crowds. Light-weight and portable, these floating sofas provide a safe, comfortable fishing platform that works well on still waters. Whether you are hunting trout in a high-mountain lake, bass in a lowland reservoir, or bluegills in a nearby pond, float tubes provide many of the advantages of a boat without the need for a trailer and launch ramp. You can enjoy great success with one straight out of the box, but there are a few things that can make them more user friendly and effective.
Inflation
Filling a float tube with air can be a tiresome chore, especially if you happen to see fish rising or being caught nearby. Many folks use a manually operated foot pump or dual-stroke hand pump. Either style will usually inflate a tube in about five minutes, which for some of us can seem like an eternity. If the water is not too far from where you park your vehicle, you may want to consider using an electric pump. These fist-sized devices plug into your vehicle’s power outlet and will usually have your tube fully swollen within a few minutes. On a hot, muggy day, it’s really nice to let electrons do the work. Better yet, if you have a truck or SUV with plenty of room for an inflated tube, consider inflating it before you leave home.
It’s always a smart move to carry an emergency inflation device when you are afloat. Assuming you haven’t done something stupid (such as seriously overinflating the tube), it’s unlikely you’ll have to deal with a sudden, catastrophic deflation. A more likely (though still rare) scenario is a bladder that starts to go soft. This can be due to an improperly sealed fill valve, a quick drop in air temperature, or a pinhole leak.
Some folks like to carry a small hand pump onboard so they can refill the bladder quickly. Just make sure you have the right adapter for the type of valve fitted to your tube. If your lung function is OK and your float tube is fitted with Boston valves (Caddis and Classic Accessories), you can inflate the tube by mouth. A few breaths should be enough to firm up the bladder and get you safely back to shore. Two or three feet of flexible tube works well and can be easily stowed in one of the pockets. The pipe that comes with your hand or foot pump is probably perfect for the job.
Efficient Finning
Ask a bunch of tubers which f ins they prefer, and you’ll likely hear high praise from devotees of regular diving fins and enthusiastic endorsements from those who use fins designed for tubing. Each group will point to situations where their fins are supposedly superior. Either way, however, much as with fly rods and casting, it pays to develop an efficient technique before you start spending serious money on whatever you fancy.
Most folks use a scissor-kick motion that’s somewhat similar to the way a diver’s legs move, with thrust being applied on both the up and down stroke. Some tubing fins feature an upswept blade, which is claimed to improve down-stroke force, though I’m not aware of anyone who has actually proved this. Also, folks using donut-style tubes can use the tube as a brace for their knees, which longtime friend Lee Haskin tells me adds extra force to his down stroke.
Regardless of which f ins you use, studies on divers have shown most of the thrust is generated by the leg-straightening move, which is the upstroke kick for tubers. Indeed, this up-stroke bias is likely even more pronounced for tubers, since (unlike a diver) their legs and hips aren’t oriented directly opposite the direction of travel. As such, optimizing your upward stroke will likely provide the most benefit. From an efficiency standpoint, you want a paddling stroke that pushes water as close to parallel to the surface as possible. Anything that forces water away from this ideal direction reduces efficiency. This is the float-tube version of trimming a boat motor, where the wrong angle either produces a rooster tail or pushes the bow down into the water, both of which slow the boat and waste fuel.
I’m sure you could run some computer simulations to determine the best stroke, but there’s actually a simple way to trim your stroke for maximum efficiency. Just pay attention to the boil of water that surfaces behind the tube after each kick. The farther away it is, the more efficient the stroke. If the water boils up right behind the tube, your technique needs some tweaking. Most likely, you need to begin the upstroke with more bend in the knee, sort of like a sitting Can Can dancer. And don’t kick as if you are trying to knock out a competitor in a martial arts tournament. A smooth buildup of force provides the most efficient transfer of power from your legs to the water. Just how far back you can make the boil appear is likely dependent on leg length, seat height, and knee flexibility.
Duck Style
The scissor-kick style isn’t the only way to move your tube. It occurred to me that evolution has probably come up with a better way to float on top of the water and move by paddling feet. It didn’t take long to realize the obvious: ducks are basically feathered float tubes. Take a look at how they move their legs and webbed feet underwater, and you’ll notice it looks a lot like pedaling a bike.
Intrigued, I dragged my tube to the lake to see if this approach is even workable. It took a while to get things dialed in, but paddling duck style is definitely an option. It’s almost exactly the same motion you’d use to work bicycle pedals, just in reverse, given that you’re moving backward. Having used this technique over multiple trips, three things have become apparent.
First, if you use a tube with a raised seat, you need to position your bum closer to the edge of the seat and place your hands on the tube. This provides a stable hip and leg alignment that closely matches that of a bicycle and produces a more effective pedaling motion.
Second, it pays to concentrate on pointing your fins straight down at the beginning of the power stroke. This ensures the blade grabs as much water as possible and forces it straight back, instead of upward.
Finally, let your ankle go loose on the return stroke. That way the fin doesn’t slow you down by pushing water against the direction of travel. Once you have the basic motion sorted out, it takes surprisingly little effort to move at a good clip. It feels a lot like cycling on a flat road. Of course, “a good clip” is hardly a quantitative measure of speed. Is it really any better than the regular kick? One of the nice things about a fish finder with GPS is that it tells you how fast you are moving. Any difference of more than a tenth of a mile per hour registers on the screen. This allows you to assess the efficiency of kicking styles in real time. I decided to run tests that compared the two strokes at what I call cruising speed. This is faster than you’d use to troll a fly, but not so fast that your breathing becomes labored. It’s a good speed for covering lots of water.
The first three runs were with a scissor-kick stroke and provided an average speed of 0.6 miles per hour. I gave my legs a few minutes to recover, repositioned myself in the seat, and began three runs duck style. Quite frankly, I didn’t notice much difference in speed, but the GPS showed I was averaging 0.8 mph.
A 0.2-mph difference in average speed doesn’t seem like much, and for short fishing sessions, it’s unimportant, but when you spend several hours on the water, a 33 percent improvement in efficiency can make the day a lot more productive and enjoyable. I tend to use the conventional kick for fishing and switch to the duck kick when I need to travel.
Just for giggles, I compared the two styles with a flat-out burst of speed. The regular kick topped out at 1 mph, while the duck managed 1.2 mph. So while duck-style paddling is more efficient, there’s no need to worry about getting busted for speeding in a no-wake zone. . . .
Going Far
When it comes to actual fishing, few craft allow you to position yourself as precisely as a float tube. I’ve fished from pontoon boats, canoes, kayaks, prams, and all kinds of boats, and none of them are a match for the tube when it comes to fly fishing bankside structure or weed beds. With the deft use of the fins, you can work every inch of a downed tree, weed bed, or rocky point, and that can really pay off when you’re after largemouth or smallmouth bass, trout, or crappies.
Of course, there’s an obvious downside to tubes. Even with an efficient paddling technique, they aren’t great for traveling long distances. Covering just 400 yards can take close to twenty minutes of continuous paddling. And let’s be honest, on larger lakes, 400 yards isn’t far at all. I sometimes fish a lake where a prime spot for prespawn bass is half a mile from the nearest launch point. It takes almost 40 minutes of nonstop paddling to reach the spot on a wind-free day. Add in a mild breeze, and it can take 50 minutes to go from launching the tube to actually fishing. And then of course there’s the need to paddle all the way back at the end of the session. Sometimes I make the effort to fish there, and sometimes I don’t.
When it comes to covering long distances in lakes, you really need something more than fins. Some folks use a kayak paddle to help move them along. This certainly works, though float tubes are wider than most kayaks and also require you to paddle backward, both of which can lead to arm fatigue.
Fortunately, someone has come up with a really neat way to go far in a tube. It’s called the Drill Paddle and features a small propeller at the end of an easy-to-hold shaft. Power is provided by a cordless drill. The setup is ridiculously easy to use. Slip the shaft of the paddle into the drill chuck, tighten it up, and you’re ready to go. Get your fins out of the way, lower the prop into the water and the drill does the rest. You change direction by orienting the shaft to one side or the other, much as you’d steer an outboard motor.
The speed of the Drill Paddle is dictated by the speed of the drill. Not surprisingly, faster drills will provide a higher top speed. I can scoot along at 2 mph with an inexpensive drill that has a top speed of 650 rpm. Quite frankly, that’s plenty fast enough, but if you have a serious need for speed, an 1,800-rpm drill should get you close to 5 mph, which is actually the limit for the prop.
One thing to bear in mind is that most cordless drills aren’t designed to operate at maximum speed for long periods of time. Some drills have an automatic thermal cutoff if the motor starts to overheat, yet not all come with this handy feature. My cheapo drill can go for about five minutes and cover almost three hundred yards before it gets too warm and shuts off. Fortunately, the drill needs only a few minutes to cool down to get me back underway. Using the drill at a lower speed will probably reduce or eliminate drill overheating, but who wants to pootle along at just 1 mph?
Rod Storage
One of the more irritating challenges with float tubes is stowing extra fly rods. When fishing lakes, you’ll often want to have at least two rods set up with different lines so you can quickly change techniques as the need arises. Having your rods prestrung also gets around the “pleasure” of trying to string a rod while sitting in a tube. Believe me, this isn’t for the faint of heart.
Not all tubes come with a system for stowing extra rods, and the ones that do are likely designed for spinning rods, making them less than ideal for most fly rods. Not surprisingly, numerous do-it-yourself rod-holder systems can be found online. Ed Migale wrote a great piece on DIY rod caddies in the May/June 2018 issue of this magazine. His design showed how you can turn plastic pipe and carabiner clips into highly functional rod holders. This is a project that anyone with modest DIY skills can manage.
However, if DIY terrifies you, there’s an exceedingly simple solution available at your local hardware store. Reusable rubber twist ties are designed to secure all kinds of objects and do a great job with fly rods. A pair of 12-inch ties will handle a couple of rods with no trouble. If the pockets on your tube feature D rings, just twist one end of the tie to the ring and the other end around your rod(s). My Cumberland tube provides Velcro straps that do a poor job of holding fly rods, but are great for holding twist ties.
There’s plenty of other things you can do with a tricked-out tube, but the above should give plenty of options and make your time on the water more effective and fun. Go tubing!
